This invention relates to a method and system for managing documents by opening document information to the public over a computer network and allowing the public to share the document information.
As computer networks have become wide spread in recent years, everyone has now become able to gain direct access to information laid open to public. Due to such a change of the social environment, persons can individually open their information to the public and can more easily appeal their characters and achievements. At the same time, since everyone can share individual achievements, information, know-how and knowledge thus opened to the public, intellectual productivity of organizations can be improved as a whole.
Also, a framework that allows persons to freely transmit their own information has been established with the progress of communication network technologies. For instance, persons can now transmit information to the world through electronic news, electronic mail, WWW, and so forth.
Such a computer network functions as an infrastructure of information sharing. The progress of such network has accelerated the establishment of the infrastructures, but the latter merely provides a necessary condition of information sharing but does not necessarily promote information sharing itself.
As individual members mutually open to the public those information, knowledge, know-how, etc, that they have individually accumulated and managed to improve their own intellectual productivity, information sharing may provide the effect of improving intellectual productivity of a group as a whole.
Electronic boards on computer networks and home pages of the Internet have been used as means for sharing information on the computer networks. When records of reference to the open information are counted, the party that opens the information to the public can grasp to a certain extent the reaction to the open information.
As described above, however, the computer network itself merely facilitates information sharing, and the preparation of the computer network does not directly promote information sharing and the improvement of intellectual productivity of the whole group. In other words, even when information is opened to the public through the computer network, the information is utilized immediately. Even when the information is merely opened to the public and can be looked up by the group, it cannot be said that the information is really shared and does not result in the improvement of intellectual productivity of the group unless it is utilized in practice.
JP-A-10-83386 discloses an information sharing assistance system that clarifies the degree of contribution to the improvement of intellectual productivity of the whole group and can promote sharing of public information by opening information to the public as described above.
On the other hand, the information electronically opened to the public has the feature that it can be easily copied and processed and can be offered to third parties. When individuals combine information offered by others and process such information, they can create information having a new value that does not exist in the original information, and transmit again the new information. When such a process is repeated, a plurality of people can verify, add and correct the information and can thus create new information that is more concentrated and has higher utility.
A practical problem here is that the original information is often utilized against the intention of the original information transmitter. Receivers of information look up the information either intentionally or unintentionally against the intention of the transmitter of the original information, apply perverted interpretation or wrong evaluation and again transmit the information, lowering the value of the original information.
A group-ware is known as systems for assisting creation of an electronic board and a group document as a creative group work by a plurality of users. However, these systems can certainly assist members to comment on the document submitted to a common work space but cannot assist communication of information in such a form that individual members collect information stored in their own sites, edit the information and combine the information with other information to create information to which a new value is added. These systems cannot cope with the problem of re-utilization of the information against the intention of the transmitter, either.
In permission management in a file system on a network, it is possible to authorize others to gain access to the information of an individual. However, it is not possible to impart authorization, that permits others gaining access to the information to re-utilize the information, to the information. The owner of the information has no way to know even when the information is re-utilized without notice.
As described above, according to the conventional method, whether or not the user asks the owner of the information the permission to re-utilize the information is left to the user's discretion, and time and labor to ask the permission hinder smooth circulation of the information for the user who deliberately asks the permission.
When the user re-utilizes the information without permission, circulation of the information gives no merit to the owner of the information unless the owner is aware of it. When the owner becomes later aware of the circulation, futile time and labor are necessary for both owner and user because the problem of re-utilization of the information against the intention of the owner occurs in many cases as described above.